xenia > Recent Status Updates

just learnt that the story of dinah in the torah is about a daughter who goes to "visit the women of the land" then is raped, starting a war between the israelites and hivites. by the medieval period, dinah had become a symbol of the woman who deserved her punishment due to her curiosity and idleness.

now i gotta replay last of us part ii and analyse why the FUCK one of the characters is called dinah 🤷‍♀️

this is not just a fantastic analysis of class, but of patriarchy and heteronormativity in antiquity. im kinda blown away. over and again, chris shows how integral patriarchal control of women's bodies was to the aristocracy, whether of the greek pater or arabic harem. marriage consolidated class through the mechanism of inheritance. over and again, peasant revolted through collective property and care. its profound.

heh, so on the other pole from celibacy was cynicism, another refusal of patriarchy and marriage, but this time through sexual promiscuity, nonmonogamy, and gender noncomformity. no slavish fixation to the social ladder, to chauvinist norms of honour and propriety, just fucking public in a park cuz it makes you happy and embracing your son's loving marriage to a sex worker 💖

sooo, from antiquity to the medieval period (hell, even to now), celibacy was used to refuse patriarchal injunctions, because marriage centralised power into the patriarch. celibacy was an escape from gendered violence and institutionalised misogyny.

losing my mind realising the conservative trope of the good hardworking rural folk vs the corrupt decadent urbanites came from ancient jewish peasants being taxed to fuck by hellenistic forces funding gentrification projects, like gymnasiums where naked men grappled with each other. in this case, the decadent urbanites were imperialist aristocrats leeching off the labour of poor colonised jews.

im such a dumb dumb. gentrification comes from gentry, the landed aristocrats who move into conquered land and, through tithes and taxes, accumulate wealth into cities modeled after the imperial centre. in this case, hellenised roman gentry and jewish high priests extracted resources and stole land from the jewish peasantry. they responded with social banditry. robin hood shit. then anti-imperialist war.

one of the most boomer ass screeds ive ever read. this man is so cucked by his war trauma that any emancipatory movement is read as the advent to stalinist purges and nazi genocide. he spends pages detailing the atrocities of poor movements, then describes their punishments by the church and the state in single lines. even when innocents are burned alive, atrocity is singularly fixed on 'anarchists'. jesus wept.

mf keeps calling hierarchically-organised xenophobic populist fanatics 'anarchists' rather than fascists. i just dont get liberals at all. they just collapse every stance that isn't theirs into the camp of extremist. they're so dishonest.

i am still learning a lot about hierarchically-organised xenophobic populist christian fanatics though, lol.

ty bram stoker for making a supernatural mystery about a centuries old cosmic horror so fucking boring

gonna start calling 1800s gothic horror windbag fiction cuz all the characters take forever to say nothing

I miss the days when it was Christians burning their own churches. Not one more scumlord is stealing my goat!

Kinda hate their definition of white supremacy as "one true way of doing things, perfectionism, and fear of conflict". I was raised by Chinese parents and these constraints were just as present. I know plenty of other Asian friends who experienced similar pressures. There're too many blanket definitions like this throughout the book, that are way too general and (dare I say) white-centric.

A lot of this book has been basic advice about communication, consent, collaboration across four modes of relating (emotional, social, practical, erotic). Not necessarily bad, but more relevant to those who've only just started undoing their trauma (borderline, avoidant, narcissistic). One cool concept is embodied consent. In ordinary consent, one may say yes, even as the body screams no. Fear is there mind killer~

This is a cool introduction to polyamory, trauma, and anarchism, but it isn't as radical as it positions itself to be. Supposedly, honesty, collaboration, and authenticity are post-monogamous principles that fight against white supremacy. Uhh, these are things couples counselors have been pushing to monogamous white middle-class people for half a century. It's good relationship advice, but c'mon babe 🤷‍♀️

Heh, the early educators of the US were extremely earnest about education having nothing to do with knowledge, but with obedience. The breakdown of childlike spontaneity, curiosity, and independence, for a love of the nation grounded in prejudice and subordination. These are the literal words they used. It's crazy—they were so honest.

hello friends, i am retiring my pseudonym akemi. it was created in a time of intense distress and suicidality, and while i will always treasure their resolve, it's time to tuck them into bed so they can sleep the long snonk.

henceforth i will be known as xenia, which means hospitality, obligation to others, love of strangers (the opposite of xenophobia). it's also the name of the trans furry linux mascot lol.

There're some issues to liberatory harm reduction. It wants to destigmatise all survival tactics and coping mechanisms, but some are created to destroy us. Junk food and food deserts exist to destroy the bodies of the lower class. Drugs have been used, throughout history, to nullify resistance to colonialism. We need a systemic critique of insidious survival tactics that lead to self and collective destruction.

Really interesting take on self-harm as a form of self-healing. Whereas trauma dissociates and disconnects you from your body, the pain from self-harm brings you back into your body. It's not merely about regaining agency or soothing nerves, it's a somatic response to a disrupted proprioception, the sensation/configuration of the body in relation to its surroundings.

This book is making me realise that all those years I was abusing drugs wasn't a slow suicide but an attempt to stay alive. That even though I wanted to die, everything in my body was fighting against that.

Mina is soooo horny for Lucy, talking about her beauty in the churchyard moonlight and tucking her into bed to keep her warm and safe 🥺 She's been writing about her nonstop for days!! ask her out, grrrl~

I never realised how much trans, gay, and sex worker struggles intersected through underground needle exchanges. The fight against HIV coinciding with safe drug use coinciding with HRT, survival mechanisms for those marginalised by the state, demonised by the public, and raped, arrested, and killed by cops. Liberatory harm reduction as oriented to community needs, rather than the needs of capital.

I love therapy, but the focus on dyadic relations can be exhausting. No one person should be expected to fix all your problems. It's why people burnout or lash out, despite their best efforts. So much of this year was me trying to create support networks for vulnerable people, but I experienced a lot of vicarious trauma and compassion fatique by the end of it. Hoping this book reorients me to a more collective frame.

It's profound seeing the development of psychotherapy, from the detached daddy interpreter espousing the meaning of their clients' experiences from above, to the catharsis model of spontaneous relief without lasting change, to memory reconsolidation's deployment of emotions towards new narratives, to mentalisation and the speculation of other minds held in concert with one's own. It's so rich and beautiful.

the long haunt of the landed aristocracy and absolutist submission

rip bram stoker, you would have loved technofeudalism

Reading neuroscience next to trauma lit is interesting, because brain plasticity is celebrated as the physiological mechanism of learning, yet it's also the reason people get trapped in traumatic scripts, defaulting to what's protected them in the past, even as it wrecks their life in the present. Traumas that fire together, wire together. It's so much easier to reinforce habits than break them.

Mad respect for this therapist. There's a section where she straight up says some of us will never heal fully, our lives are too chaotic, fragile, disabled. It's a tiny paragraph, but absolutely fucking affirming to those failed by this world. She ends with but we gotta keep trying anyway. It's both really grounded and sweet.

Really fucking glad this book pushes against the IFS dogma that there is a capable self in all of us just waiting to self-heal dysfunction. This simply isn't true for trauma victims, who have not been taught how to regulate arousal, self-soothe, process emotions, articulate attachment wounds, mentalise other minds. We all have the capacity to develop a self, but it's something mutually constructed through the other.

Heh, internal family systems sees personality disorders as parts in a dysfunctional whole. I like reclaiming terms like borderline and narcissist, but IFS's rejection of total pathology makes sense. I've always hated the introvert/extrovert binary, because my sociality is dependent on who I'm with and how I feel. It's much the same with personality disorders. The field primes certain parts to emerge.

fragility is far more dangerous than stupidity. it's what milquetoast liberals miss when they see reactionaries as stupid, and therefore themselves as rational, level, and objective, the petty narcissism of humanism. but fragility makes the privileged clamp down in the face of facts, counter discourses, calls for accountability. they're not stupid, they're terrified, and terror breeds rigidity, dismissal & cruelty.

The blindspots of neuroscientists are crazy. This guy gives great empirical evidence of babies having an understanding of object coherence, deductive reasoning, and number theory, gives a speculative account of what's going on behind the curtain, then doesn't connect them together at all. He just keeps repeating all this happens in the brain, because all he's analysing are brain scans. What the heck??

I've been helping and homing people illegally evicted and seeking refuge from abuse and transphobia, while tutoring two gender studies papers which is too much for one disabled bean. The inhuman power of landlords to kill those they don't want to deal with is fucking revolting.

I have two seminars planned for 2026, on intersex science/activism and decolonial/nonbinary genders, so expect book updates soon~